Union issues absent from Orleans Parish School Board election forum

Orleans Parish School Board candidates arrived at an Alliance for Good Government forum last week looking for endorsements as they seek a role in shaping the future of the city's public schools. With New Orleans struggling with below-average test scores, high dropout rates and crime committed by young people who see no other future for themselves, audience members might...

Orleans Parish School Board candidates arrived at an Alliance for Good Government forum last week looking for endorsements as they seek a role in shaping the future of the city's public schools. With New Orleans struggling with below-average test scores, high dropout rates and crime committed by young people who see no other future for themselves, audience members might have expected teachers unions, collective bargaining or the length of the school year to come up for discussion.

Eliot Kamenitz, The Times-PicayuneDiscussion of teachers' union issues have been largely absent from the Orleans Parish School Board election currently underway. That contrasts with scenes like this one from July 2011 in which Jefferson Parish Federation of Teachers President Meladie Munch addressed the school board about a furlough day for teachers.

None of them did. Also absent: almost any mention of teacher evaluations, tenure or pay.

None of the issues that just convulsed Chicago public schools during a teachers strike, or that regularly spark lively debate in neighboring Jefferson Parish and the state Capitol in Baton Rouge, made much of an appearance at all.

When it comes to debate on public education, at least as it plays out among those vying for a direct hand in how schools are governed, New Orleans can seem to be on a planet of its own.

It's easy to overstate this, of course. Forums like the ones hosted by the Alliance for Good Government at Loyola University tend to mask differences of opinion rather than bring them out, as candidates declare how passionately they want a quality education for every child.

To some extent, the candidates also are at the mercy of whatever questions moderators choose to ask.

Real differences exist over the wisdom of drawing instructors from Teach for America, say, or where to set the board's property tax rate.

Yet, for better or worse, the public discourse on schools in New Orleans stands at a far remove from that in places like New York or Chicago, where struggles between labor, represented by teachers unions, and management, represented by a mayor or superintendent, sometimes erupt into public standoffs.

State Superintendent John White, who worked in both of those cities before arriving in New Orleans to lead the Recovery School District, said, "In my experience in Chicago and New York, you have these huge interests: a union that purports to speak for all the teachers and a bureaucracy that speaks for the system as a whole."

In New Orleans, on the other hand, "you have independent boards that represent the interests of their parents and their teachers," said White, named the state's education superintendent in January.

Indeed, the chief reason why education debates take on such a different tone in New Orleans is structural, though not everyone agrees with White's positive view of it.

The independent boards he cites are the ones that govern the city's autonomous charter schools, which have come to dominate the educational landscape since Hurricane Katrina. The boards oversee a principal or CEO who hires teachers and other staff at will.

Teachers unions recede

Most of the charter schools, under the Recovery School District framework, answer to the state for their test scores, but the state has no collective bargaining contract with teachers at its schools. Nor does the Orleans Parish School Board, which held on to about 17 schools after the storm and now oversees mainly charters as well.

For officials like White, who in other cities often have to grapple with powerful unions over even minor policy changes, the New Orleans school system -- or system of schools, as some put it -- is a welcome anomaly.

Of course, the lack of a strong teachers union leaves open the question of whether teachers are being fairly represented in the debate, or represented at all.

Larry Carter, the president of the United Teachers of New Orleans, the union that once regularly faced off with the Orleans Parish School Board and led the city's educators out to the picket lines over salaries, now represents just 1,300 individuals and typically does not bother to attend meetings of the state or local school boards. He didn't return a phone call seeking comment for this article.

It wasn't always like this. Public school teachers went on strike in New Orleans in 1966, 1969, 1978 and finally in 1990, the last time shuttering classrooms across the city for three weeks.

When the School Board, having lost control of a majority of the city's schools and the funding that went with them, voted to terminate its union contract and lay off all of the district's employees after Katrina, the paradigm shifted.

The idea of bringing back collective bargaining came before the board in 2008 and was voted down.

'I believe in school autonomy'

Meanwhile, in the absence of a powerful union voice, something resembling a consensus on the approach to take with public schools does seem to be developing in New Orleans, centered around the idea of giving all public schools -- whether traditionally governed or charter -- the autonomy to make decisions without interference from a central office.

"I believe in school autonomy," School Board member Cynthia Cade said at last week's forum. "I believe that the principal and staff should be responsible for running the school, with the oversight of a governing board." Her opponent, a young insurance company owner named Durrell Laurent, didn't challenge her.

Nor would any other sitting members of the Orleans Parish board, who also espouse a commitment to "site-based management" of schools. There may be animosities on the board, but they tend to focus on questions of who will get to chair what committee or serve as board president, rather than ideological fault lines.

Even Karran Harper Royal, an education activist and one of the most vocal critics of charter school practices since Katrina, answered with an unhesitating "yes" when asked, "Charter schools: best for the district?" during a "lightning round" of yes-or-no questions. She's in a race to represent Lakeview and parts of Mid-City against sitting board member Brett Bonin and nonprofit organization founder Sarah Newell Usdin, who both also answered "yes."

The most obvious unsettled question in all this is what the long-term structure of the city's school system will be. The School Board members want to wrest control of most schools back from the Recovery District: Most candidates in this year's board elections seem to agree on that point, although current state policy leaves the decision on whether to be part of the RSD or the parish system in the hands of individual schools, not the board.

Yet some kind of return to local governance seems to be an increasingly noncontroversial idea. During a panel discussion on schools this weekend at Xavier University, Caroline Roemer Shirley, head of the Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools, summed up what looks like a growing consensus: "The RSD was never supposed to be permanent."